When E. Jean Carroll spoke Wednesday in his defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, he explained how he slandered his character.
“When I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” said Carroll, who first revealed the alleged attack in a 2019 memoir. “He lied and broke my reputation, and I’m here to see if I can get my life back. “. “
Carroll, who was questioned for hours through Trump’s lawyer on Thursday, first sued Trump in 2019 and then filed another lawsuit in November under a New York state law that gives abuse victims a year to sue, even as the statute of limitations ended. for the alleged crime.
Trump has continually denied Carroll’s rape allegation, and Carroll says Trump’s claims that she “lied” and engaged in a “complete scam” led to her being bombarded with an avalanche of hate messages.
Questioned: Donald Trump’s Questions to Rape Accuser E. Jean Carroll
Carroll was questioned and tested by the story she told and the sinuous and colorful way she has told it since filing her complaint. But the pioneering journalist said she was surrounded by support first and foremost.
“I’ve been in a cocoon of love and support,” Carroll told USA TODAY in a 2019 phone interview, saying other people sent him positive messages, texts and even approached him on the street.
It was not the answer that some would have imagined. But Carroll spent his life defying expectations.
A former queen of good looks, she has become a pioneer in global literary journalism. A Midwestern girl, she rose to fame in New York’s elite media circles. Communicate about sex, good fortune and love.
The charge: E. Jean Carroll spoke to two other people about her alleged rape. That’s what they remember.
Coverage: Why are we so reluctant to communicate about Carroll’s allegation?
In 2019, Lisa Chase recalled the first time she performed in a Carroll play.
“I think it’s hilarious,” said Chase, who first edited Carroll 3 decades earlier, when she was editor of Outside magazine. “When you hire E. Jean, you need a funny story with feeling and empathy. “
But the two women have become friends, Carroll’s allegations of being sexually assaulted through Trump at a posh Manhattan branch about 30 years ago were the ones Carroll never shared.
“For years I asked him to write memoirs,” said Chase, who edited Carroll’s recommendations column in Elle magazine from 2005 to 2017. “I had no idea she had those stories. She kept them to herself. “
Carroll’s book, “What Do We Need Men For?” Main points an allegation, first excerpt from New York magazine, that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman locker room in the mid-1990s. Two of Carroll’s friends told the New York Times that she told them about the incident some time after it allegedly happened. Trump has denied assaulting her.
The : E. Jean Carroll’s is out. What You Should Know About Your Claim
“This is a fraudulent and false story,” Trump said on his website Truth Social.
Long before this complicated moment in the media spotlight, Carroll, a prominent journalist, known for his Ask E. Jean and for his presence in the midst of the dazzling night scene of the 80s and 90s in New York.
“There’s a circuit in New York,” Chase said. You move on to events. You move on to the advances. . . You move on to dinners. She on TV. She writes. She is beautiful, smart and funny. (John Johnson) who has a wonderful user quality in the air. She in this world. “
Carroll made his mark on television, writing for “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s and his own show “Ask E. Jean” on MSNBC’s predecessor, America’s Talking, from 1994 to 1996.
But it was her writing, which appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone and Playboy, where Carroll became the first woman to be named editor-in-chief, that made Carroll a trailblazer.
“It’s the age of the tabloids,” Roger Friedman, editor of online entertainment news site Showbiz411, said in a 2019 interview.
Friedman, who edited Fame magazine from 1987 to 1991 and later wrote New York magazine’s Intelligencer column, said, “People were looking for scoops. You didn’t have mobile phones. You didn’t have internet. You had to get up, put on your hat and pay attention to the story. . . . He was a user who talked to people. “
Carroll became known for the taste for writing and reporting called gonzo journalism. A hallmark of writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, whose biography Carroll wrote, and Tom Wolfe was a school of storytelling in which hounds were part of history, providing fun: rarely scandalous – non-public experiences.
“In the world of literary journalism, she’s a gamer, which says a lot,” Chase said. “There weren’t many women who were hired through men’s magazines. And she’s Array. “
Carroll also drew comparisons to the famous filmmaker and Nora Ephron.
“Both are evil hounds who place their subject in left field,” Kirkus Review wrote in a review of “Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars, And Other Modern Girls,” an e-book Carroll wrote in the 1980s. “Carroll, however, is wilder than Ephron, content not only with the stage, but also with borrowing one. “
Candace Bushnell, whose “Sex and The City” column in the New York Observer encouraged HBO’s iconic exhibition of the same name, was a fan.
“I’ve known E. Jean or known her since at least the ’80s,” Bushnell said in an email to USA TODAY in 2019. “She was the coolest journalist of the moment: daring, she had a lot of courage. “. , and was as fun as the boys. She was a gonzo journalist. In the mid-90s, I hung out with her quite a bit. . . There was and is no one else like her. “
Chase said the last article he asked Carroll to write about a women-only rafting trip. I’m sure of your idea. . . He had a life adventure full of adventures. “
Elizabeth Jean “Jeannie” Carroll’s adventure began in a much more traditional way.
Carroll spent her formative years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the eldest of four children in a family circle that included a younger brother and two sisters.
It’s Midwestern life, in mid-century America. But Carroll felt she could be who she sought to be and who she sought to be. “I’m free,” he told USA TODAY. I grew up in the 40s and 50s. I rode my bike all over the city. I started driving when I was 14. . . The world will knock you down, pay you less, tell you you’re not that good. But when you’re a kid, anything is possible. “
Carroll’s ambitions as a writer soon blossomed. ” I was filling the U. S. mail with arguments for Array magazines. . . At the age of 12,” he recalls. catalog, creating a story, I guess I sought to be a writer.
A member of the 1967 elegance, Carroll named Miss Indiana University as well as Miss Cheerleader U. S. A. , which earned her a scholarship.
Carroll is also a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, but in an article in the October 1996 Indianapolis Monthly factor, she said that the band “kicked me out 20 years later for anything I wrote for Playboy about sorority fever. “cute. ”
The first time Carroll landed in New York City after college.
“I think it’s the most glorious post in the world,” he said. His first job? The other people of the Japanese tea ceremony. It’s fabulous. “
Indiana, other people who visited the exhibition identified her and asked if she was the cheerleader who had been Miss Indiana University.
After this first contact with Manhattan, Carroll traveled to Africa, lived in Montana with her first husband, Steve Byers, and spent time in Chicago. But after writing an article in Esquire, Carroll’s writing career began to take off.
He returned to New York to interview Fran Lebowitz for Outside magazine and stayed forever.
“I had jeans, cowboy boots, a fringed jacket, some shirts,” he says. “And that’s it. “
In his book, Carroll says he had only seen Trump once before the day he said he met him at Bergdorf Goodman. Meanwhile, Trump said he didn’t know her.
However, a photograph appears in which their paths crossed. Dated “circa 1987,” this is a photo of Carroll; her husband at the time, former New York anchor John Johnson; and Trump with his first wife, Ivana.
At the time the photo was taken, Times Square had not yet become the mecca of tourism, which was later derogatory compared to Disneyland. At the time, visitors to New York City were warned not to take the subway after dark.
“In the ’80s, everyone was afraid of being attacked,” Friedman recalls. “There was graffiti and his car was constantly being damaged. . . All the cars had symptoms that said ‘no radio inside. ‘”
But New York is also the capital of media, finance and fashion, and for a bright setting, it’s a golden and glamorous age. Studio 54, the legendary nightclub, closed in 1980, but new nightclubs like Nell’s made the impression on the scene, and restaurants like Michael’s were among the cool corners where chic and rough met.
One of the greatest mythical bars and restaurants of Elaine, frequented by a local of writers, actors and artists.
“I lived at Elaine’s house,” Carroll said. I was sitting at the writers’ table and it was paradise on earth. . . You can come in at any time and there was a writers’ table, and you just sat down. Sometimes, detectives would sign up for us. Sometimes boxers. But there was a writers’ table, and it was usually a Thursday night.
Everyone in the publishing world there, he says, adding Jackie Kennedy, who is editor, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese.
Also at Elaine’s house he met Johnson, “the wonderful New York host and one of the most charming and complete men in Manhattan,” he wrote in “Why Do We Need Men?”Johnson sits with television reporter Geraldo. Rivera, who, when the couple married in the Hamptons, her witness.
Trump is also a staple of New York’s nightlife. The 1980s were the decade in which Trump Tower opened and Trump’s memoir “The Art of Negotiation” was published. Both helped turn him into a celebrity, propelling Trump’s brash and boastful personality beyond the local tabloid pages to appearances on national screens like “Late Night with David Letterman” and “60 Minutes. “
Meanwhile, Carroll’s writing career continued to flourish. In 1993, his Ask E. Jean column debuted in Elle, and for nearly three decades, Carroll conveyed a tough love to his millions of readers, dampening his recommendation with humor, irreverence, and references that included St. Teresa and artist Frida Kahlo.
In a column, dated Sept. 20, 2006, one woman wrote that she was “married to the best man” but was dissatisfied because her wealthy husband was hesitant to even pay for a facial.
Carroll first gave the woman a homemade recipe to look good (“Puree with 3 tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of milk and 10 strawberries. . . Your skin will glow. “) He then told the counselor to find an assignment and get out of the marriage.
“Now that you feel better, look around and ask yourself, why do I let this **** my life?”Carroll wrote. ” Hunny, is on his way to adapting to an aggressor. Get out while you can. . . Hire a smart divorce lawyer and leave. “
“There was a lot of realism in his recommendation to women,” said Chase, Carroll’s editor at Elle. Can you? And if you can’t, here’s what you can do to. . . get to that point. ‘”
During their friendship, Chase said she also won the recommendation of Carroll, who ran a dating service and arranged her for some dates.
“She told me . . . ‘It’s impossible, never track anyone down,'” said Chase, who resumed dating after the death of her husband, Peter Kaplan, a former editor of the New York Observer, in 2013. “I knew what it was. saying, ‘It’s going to be very hard for you to find someone you love the way you enjoyed it. ‘. . . . It turns out she wasn’t entirely right because I discovered someone I like. But it was a moment of truth, which I actually enjoyed. “
Still, given Carroll’s era growing up, Chase said she wasn’t a full counselor who kept some of her own troubling reports to herself.
“She’s part of a generation of women who were raised not to do that,” Chase said. “She was lovely and expected to do and be sure of things and was looking for a bigger life. . . She is empathetic. But it’s also personal.
Carroll’s penchant for writing and voice informed him of the narrative of Trump’s alleged sexual assault. And some have the way he described a traumatic event, as well as his initial refusal to call what he says a violation.
“Every woman can decide on her word,” Carroll said in an interview on the New York Times’ The Daily podcast after her accusation against Trump was first revealed. “Each woman can decide how she describes it. . . He didn’t rape me. Something they didn’t do to me. That’s the problem. “
But on his first day of testimony Wednesday, Carroll clear.
“I’m here, Donald Trump raped me,” she said.
Carroll told USA TODAY that there is no mystery as to how he invented the nuggets he had distributed for decades to his readers.
“Giving recommendations is simply following a non-unusual sense,” he said. “Nothing special. That’s right. I think that’s why many therapists write to me. . . They have studied psychology and the human being for years and years. “, however, it is not something unusual and the simplest recommendation will work. “
When Carroll advised him, he says he turned to an unforeseen source, reading passages written by ancient writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Marcus Aurelius.
Aurelius, in particular, provided him with the words he turned out to have experienced.
“I learned that when you wake up in the morning, you have to think that it may be the day of your death and that grass will grow very soon on your grave, so keep going,” he says. way to get up. . . It makes you really happy, oddly enough, because you have nothing to lose. “
Contributors: Associated Press, Maria Puente, Nyssa Kruse, Indianapolis Star
Follow Charisse Jones on Twitter@charissejones